Word: atomically
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...imperfect or if the materials are not the best in the tiny arena where the gigantic crush is finally focused, steel is likely to bulge like butter. Squeezed by 300 tons per sq. in., some of the contraction of a substance is due to a shrinkage of the atoms themselves. The complex atom of cesium shrinks most of all metals. Of 48 metals under high pressure, 39 become better conductors of electricity. Iron grows softer, glass harder. Squeezed water turns solid (''ice") in five different forms, one of which does not melt until heated to nearly...
From the shoulders of these two finds, atomic destruction and transmutation took fresh impetus the world over. Unencumbered by electric charges, neutrons as atom-wreckers are like wrestlers slippery with oil. They slide through the electronic field guarding the nucleus, do not swerve until they strike the hard core. Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence, who has an 85-ton magnet to play with on the University of California campus, produced a beam of 10,000,000 neutrons a second by smashing lightweight elements with deutons (nuclei of heavy hydrogen). With "slow neutrons" lately it has been found possible to produce gamma...
Some 14 years ago big-eyed, bushy-haired Peter Kapitza emerged from Leningrad's Polytechnical Institute, went to England's Cambridge, puttered with radioactivity. It occurred to him that he might learn much about the atom if he could wrench at it with tremendous magnetic forces. His first apparatus was a battery of accumulators short-circuiting through a wire coil, producing a momentary magnetic field of high power. Next he designed a huge dynamo to provide the short-circuiting power. With this the coils blew up. Kapitza stopped that by chilling the coils with liquid helium...
...hazardous pylon races. Still, the Colonel found some consolation in the thought of beating Mister Mulligan, which was entered under the skillful guidance of little Harold Neumann of Moline, Ill., who had already walked off with the rich Greve Trophy in Designer Howard's atom-small White Mike. The Labor Day crowd of 80,000 was overwhelmingly behind the gaudy Turner and the same golden plane in which he had lost the Bendix Race...
...found itself stumped when it got down to ultimate particles. Protons and electrons have electric fields, and relativistic equations which tried to allow for the presence of such fields came out with ''singularities" (anomalies). Thus physicists found themselves dealing in effect with two separate universes, the invisible atom and the vast cosmos. To Dr. Einstein this seemed wrong. His powerful imagination saw Nature as an integrated whole. Beneath the quantum mechanics and Relativity, he was sure, the deepest wells of ultimate reality held the secret of a great unity. Few years ago he made a start toward...